Lauren Johnson and Morgan Stover, juniors at Cranberry High School, work together in a sheep eye dissection. (By Dylan Lu/Student contributor)
By ALEXIS DEHNER
Student contributor
In anatomy class, students were given the opportunity to perform a dissection on sheep hearts, eyes, and brains to further their understanding of these organs.
“Being able to allow the students to manipulate the organs with their own hands taught them more than I could ever teach them with words,” stated teacher Melanie Oliver.
Beforehand, students had mixed feelings about the dissections. Some were hesitant, but most were thrilled to get a chance to learn with hands-on experiences rather than just with diagrams.
“I feel like it was beneficial seeing the actual anatomy with my own eyes rather than a diagram on paper,” said Cranberry senior Ava Fischer. “Afterwards, I felt like I grasped the different concepts and components of the heart a lot better. I also feel that I gained the ability to learn something and then to be able to apply it.”
Overall, this classroom activity has allowed those who participated in the dissection to gain a more thorough understanding of anatomy that they could not have gained by simply using a textbook.
Alexis Dehner and Dylan Lu are students at Cranberry High School and members of Cranberry Chronicles, the school’s journalism/publications class.
